The ads run fine without a website. Plenty of enquiries never touch one. But people do look you up before they hand over a few thousand pounds, and what they find decides a lot.
Three findings, with the studies they came from, so you can go and check them yourself.
That is how long it takes somebody to form a view on how your site looks. Not how long to read it. How long to judge it. Shown the same pages again, people gave the same verdict.
Lindgaard et al., Behaviour & Information Technology, 2006Researchers asked 2,684 people to work out whether a website could be trusted, then counted what they talked about. The single thing mentioned most was how it looked. Ahead of the company's credentials. Ahead of anything the site actually claimed.
Fogg et al., Stanford Web Credibility Project, 2003An audit of 2,241 firms sent each one a real enquiry through their website. Nearly a quarter never answered at all. The ones that did took 42 hours on average. That is nearly 2 days after somebody put their details into their website.
Oldroyd, McElheran & Elkington, Harvard Business Review, 2011What I can't tell you is that a good website makes somebody a certain percentage more likely to buy from you. You will see numbers like that everywhere. I went looking for where they come from and every single one traced back to a company selling websites, with no study behind it. So I am not going to put one on here.
Everybody thinks their own site is alright. That goes double if you built it yourself, because you know where everything is and you remember what it cost you in evenings.
So don't judge it. Hand your phone to somebody who has never seen it, on 4G, not the wifi. Ask them to find your phone number and tell you what you do. Then time it.
Ten seconds. If they are still scrolling, that is what every customer who looks you up is going through, and most of them will not bother finishing.
Tell me the name of the business and whether you've got a site already, even an old one. That's all I need. The rest comes off your Google listing and your photos.
A few days later you get a link. A real site, your services, your towns, your reviews. It sits on a temporary address for 7 days so you can look at it properly and show whoever you want.
Then you decide. Keep it and I put it on your domain and switch the text-back on. Don't, and it comes down at the end of the week. No pressure, because it's a real deadline: I take it down.
I build it before you pay anything. If you keep it, it's £200 a month: hosting, changes, new pages, and a text straight back to anyone who fills in the form, before you've even seen the email. No build fee, no hosting bill, no separate price for changes.
It stays mine. That is the trade. You haven't paid to build it, so you don't own it, and there is no price at which you can buy it. You use it for as long as you're paying. Stop, and it comes down.
What stays yours. Your domain name, your photos, your reviews and every word about your business. If you leave, all of that goes with you. The design and the code don't.
Month to month from day one, a month's notice. No minimum term. If it isn't earning its keep, you leave, and it takes a month.
Management means management. New photos, new prices, a service you have started doing and a whole new page for it. None of that is extra, because that is what the monthly is for. The only things I would put a separate price on are a full redesign or a second site, and you would get the number before I started.
| HomeWhat you do, where you do it, and how to reach you, without scrolling | 1 |
| AboutThe page that makes you a person rather than a website | 1 |
| ServicesOne page for each thing you take on. A kitchen page and a bathroom page beat one page mentioning both, because somebody searching for a bathroom fitter lands on a page about bathrooms | 2 to 10 |
| Case studiesBefore and after photos, what the job involved, how long it took | 1 |
| Areas coveredOne page listing every town you will travel to | 1 |
| ReviewsYour Trustpilot, Checkatrade and Google reviews as cards. Name, stars, and what they wrote | 1 |
| ContactForm goes to your phone, and a text goes straight back to them | 1 |
How many that adds up to depends on how much you do. 3 services is 9 pages. 10 services is 16. Every one of them is about something real, which is the whole point.
Why not a page for every town. Plenty of agencies will build you 10 near-identical pages with the town name swapped out. Google's own spam rules name that exact pattern, and the risk is your whole site getting marked down for thin content. Ask yourself whether the page would still be worth reading with the town name taken off it. Usually it wouldn't.
Once you have done real kitchens in Braintree, with photos, that earns a page. We add those one at a time, when there is something true to put on them.
You can leave whenever you like, on a month's notice. No minimum term and nothing to argue about. The site comes down. Your domain, your photos and your reviews go with you.
Can I buy it off you later? No, and I'd rather say that here than on the phone. Plenty of people want to own their website. If that's you, you want somebody who sells them, and I don't.
No pitch. I'll ask what a job's worth to you once everything's paid, and whether you could handle more of them. If it's not a fit I'll say so and you've lost ten minutes.
Pick a time that suits you below. You'll get a reminder the day before, and it'll be me ringing, not a call centre.
